by
Helen DeWitt
- Readers are, in fact, ostriches. They have problems of their own and they read to forget about them. Lovely glamorous Arabic would not only not make them forget their problems, it would remind them that there are all kinds of problems they can do nothing about. So there might be a small untapped market of mute inglorious McJob-bound Miltons, but there is no money to be made by writing a runaway bestseller. No. But there is money to be made by persuading the CIA to fund the project, as increasing the pool of potential intelligence-gatherers in languages of importance to national security.